Spoiler alert: Deathwing dies in Cataclysm. Then the dragons quit and declare it the age of mortals.

A bit late to the show, aren't they?

I happened to be in Ulduar the other day. You know how it goes, one minute you're threatening the Golden Lotus NPCs for giving so little rep for each daily, next thing you're in Ulduar.

While I was in there I remembered a little tiny detail from the expansion: we killed Yogg-Saron. And the Lich King. And Malygos the Insane Keeper of Magic. And some mean black dragons.

Anyway, in Ulduar will kill an Old God, restore a bunch of corrupted guardians left by the Titans, and for good measure we're the ones who convince the Titans not to destroy the planet. Total contribution of the dragons: nothing.

Speaking of killing Old Gods: Ahn'Qiraj. Somehow I was in there too. What did the dragons do for us in there? Well let's see... They held onto the scepter bits, which is nice of them to do. Except one was slightly off his rocker and gave it to a minnow. In his defense, we'd been killing him for a while. They gave us some neat gear in the raid, except we got the bits for it by killing the Qiraji and finally the Old God C'thun. In other words, they 'helped' by giving us some gear after we'd already killed the threats.

We followed it up by fighting off the Scourge, eventually sending Naxxramas fleeing to Northrend.

Speaking of the Scourge, we killed the Lich King. The contribution of the dragons was limited to saving Bolvar, because they happened to have not killed him when they strafed the Scourge. They didn't save us from those Scourge; they were already beaten by the rogue Apothecaries, who we killed.

Oh, but who helped us kill Malygos? Red dragons! Aha! Except the whole problem was that Malygos wasn't retiring, despite already being useless. Instead he decided to fix the Burning Legion problem by destroying magic, and killing everyone, equivalent to taking a flamethrower to a server to prevent hackers (which I should acknowledge, might work pretty well). Besides, we took on the blue dragons at the same time as the twilight, while working on the Scourge and Old Gods. Meanwhile the dragons were busy with their kidnapping and murder and kidnapping and rape. Productive!

Speaking of terrible black dragons: dragons. Also, who killed Nefarian and shut down the chromatic dragonflight? Us. Contribution of dragons? Well let's see: one was enslaved and used against us. Another hid in Blackrock Spire and helped us make a key so we could go to the upper spire and fight bad orcs. So I guess they helped a little. The biggest contributors were the ones who died so we could pretend to be black dragons and sneak into Onyxia's lair and kill her, though she was only there because a certain badass scared her away from Stormwind.

While we're in Blackrock Mountain, we're the ones who banished Ragnaros. Though admittedly, it was us mortals who summoned him in the first place (I'm referring to the dwarf clan wars, not us talking to Domo early and wiping the raid, not that the latter did not also happen).

Outland was pacified entirely by us mortals. Though I recognize that the dragons' power power and responsibility may be limited to Azeroth, so I won't hold this one against them. And a blue dragon did help with the Netherdrakes.

Caverns of Time: Infinite Dragonflight beaten with the help of us and the Bronze Dragonflight.

Notice the trend? The only problems the dragons fix are the ones created by their own existence. The rest we've been handling just fine on our own. They should have dug up Deathwing, beaten him, and then all retired almost a decade ago, or longer, depending on whether you're counting World of Warcraft as when mortals first rose to power or if you're counting the Warcraft RTS games.